The Making of a Dream

by Laura Wides-Muñoz

  “This lawsuit is not about immigration. It is about the rule of law, presidential power and the structural limits of the U.S. Constitution,” they wrote in their complaint.20

  To bring their lawsuit, though, the states had first to show that they had standing, meaning that they would be directly affected by the change and had a right to sue. For Texas, the question came down to driver’s licenses. Texas subsidized its licenses by more than $100 per person, and Abbott argued that even modest estimates would put the cost at “several million dollars.”

  In his speeches on the new proposals, Obama had alluded to precedents for this “deferred action,” set by Republican presidents. In 1990, President George H. W. Bush had given the deferment protection to the spouses and children of undocumented immigrants eligible for citizenship under Reagan’s 1986 amnesty. His administration had issued the order so that husbands, wives, and children who would eventually be eligible for citizenship, some 1.5 million people, couldn’t be deported while their family members prepared to petition for them, and he’d done it only after Congress had refused to take action.21

  Shortly after Hurricane Katrina, President George W. Bush’s administration issued a similar order on behalf of roughly 5,500 foreign students, allowing them to stay and work temporarily in the country even if they had come in on a study-only visa.22

  But Texas argued that the scale was different this time. Under the Obama administration order, a minimum of roughly 4 million, and possibly many more, people might be eligible. Also, the previous examples had affected immigrants who had a very good chance of eventually getting legal status (for example, a spouse or child of a US citizen). In the case of the Katrina students, they had previously enjoyed legal status as students and faced losing that status as a result of a natural disaster, not through any action of their own.

  Texas district court judge Andrew Hanen sided with Abbott and the other plaintiffs.23 In February, he issued an injunction, a more than one-hundred-page treatise designed to withstand appellate review. Since Texas provided driver’s licenses to everyone with official legal presence in the state, Hanen agreed that it had standing, and that was enough for the case to go forward. Outlining more of his own views on the matter, Hanen added that Texas and the other states were likely to have additional reasons to weigh in, including the cost of educating undocumented children, which the state put at more than $9,000 per student, and more than $700,000 in uncompensated medical care for undocumented immigrants.* But courts had already ruled that states needed to cover their education, and the potential for an additional future burden was too speculative to rule on so early in the case, Hanen noted, so for now his ruling focused on the driver’s licenses.

  Hanen also chided the Obama administration for failing to follow proper rule-making procedures before announcing the plan, noting that “once those services are provided, there will be no effective way of putting toothpaste back in the tube.”

  The twenty-six states that filed the complaint could not have picked a better judge for their case. Hanen was the same Texas judge whom California attorney and dentist Orly Taitz, one of the originators of the Obama birther conspiracy, had chosen when she had filed a lawsuit accusing Obama of “trafficking illegal aliens.” The lawsuit had eventually been thrown out, but not before Hanen required federal agents and officials to submit testimony showing they were not, in fact, in the business of “illegal alien” trafficking.

  Immigration advocates across the country, and even the Justice Department, at first seemed undaunted by Hanen’s ruling and continued to push forward, providing information about the new order.* Then, in May, a three-judge appellate panel in New Orleans denied the federal government’s request to throw out the injunction and eventually reaffirmed Hanen’s order.24 Hareth’s parents quietly put the documents they had prepared back into their file cabinets. Betty didn’t talk about going to Bolivia anymore.

  Exactly one year after Obama made his historic immigration announcement, his administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene in the Texas case. It was an effort to both move the case out of Hanen’s hands and settle it more quickly once and for all. Justice Department lawyers made a simple argument: “Nothing in the [deferred action policy] affects Texas’s freedom to alter or eliminate its subsidy at any time. Any ‘pressure’ here is thus self-created.” Texas could easily charge the undocumented immigrants for the licenses, they argued. And ensuring that those immigrants, who were in fact already living in Texas, had the right to work would actually reduce the strain on the state because they could be more self-sufficient, they added.

  IN JUNE 2015, billionaire developer and reality show host Donald Trump threw his hat into the ring for president, descending an escalator at Trump Tower in New York City and giving a speech in which he accused Mexican undocumented immigrants of being Americans’ worst nightmare. His entry into the presidential campaign completely upended American politics and political debate in many ways, but perhaps most startling was the talk about immigration.

  “The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems,” he told the crowd gathered before him. “ . . . When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with [them]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”25

  Along with announcing his candidacy, Trump promised to build a massive wall along the border and make Mexico pay for it. He soon also called for a ban on Muslim immigrants.26

  In a country where it increasingly seemed as if only a relative few people could still get ahead, now Americans had someone voicing on a national stage the fears some quietly harbored about their lack of advancement in the face of so many newcomers.

  Although national surveys showed most Americans supported immigration reform, Trump seemed to embolden those who not only sought a reduction in illegal immigration but also feared the changing demographics of the nation or, to put it starkly, the so-called browning of America. Not long after his announcement, former KKK leader David Duke decided it was the time to relaunch his long-dormant political career and run for the open US Senate seat in Louisiana. Duke would lose, but the reentry of groups such as the KKK into public view and the proliferation of the online white supremacy groups that Felipe had been wary of was just beginning.

  For the most part, the major media outlets initially treated Trump’s entrée into the race as a sideshow. But in the Spanish-language media, Trump’s line about rapists was radioactive. Univision dropped the Spanish-language simulcast of Trump’s Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants, prompting him to sue. NBC, which owns Univision’s Spanish-language rival Telemundo, ended its English-language contract for the pageants.

  In the midst of the feud, Univision anchor Jorge Ramos sought an interview with the candidate. He sent a handwritten request, as he often did for big interviews, and included his cell phone number so they could discuss it more. Trump did not pick up the phone to call. Instead, he posted Ramos’s cell phone on social media. Ramos discovered a few million people had access to his cell phone number only after landing from a flight and finding his voice mailbox full of obscene messages.

  Ramos remained dogged in his pursuit of Trump, now albeit with less diplomacy. He was determined to get the candidate to explain just how he planned to build a wall across the southern border and deport 11 million people. On August 25, during a Trump news conference in Iowa, Ramos stood up. As was his custom, he didn’t begin his question with a question; he began with a statement. Trump tried to ignore him, but Ramos, known for both his charm and his determination, refused to sit down.

  “I have the right to ask a question,” Ramos insisted.

  “No, you don’t. You haven’t been called,” Trump replied. “Go back to Univision.” For the millions of Univision viewers who would later watch the clip dubbed in Spanish, as wel
l as those who watched on Univision’s English-language TV network Fusion, he might as well have said “Go back to Mexico,” where Ramos had been born and had gotten his start in journalism.

  As Ramos continued to press Trump on how he could deport 11 million people and build a wall across the southern border, Trump looked over toward his security guards. A moment later, a guard with a buzz cut, who was a head taller than Ramos, pushed him out.

  “Don’t touch me,” Ramos insisted. “I have the right to ask a question.”

  Outside, in the lobby, a Trump supporter confronted Ramos. “Get out of my country,” the man growled, perhaps unaware that Ramos had become a US citizen in 2008.

  Back inside, ABC’s Tom Llamas and MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt asked about Ramos. First Trump insisted he didn’t know Ramos, who only a few months before had graced the cover of Time and whose private phone number Trump had shared with the world. Then he seemed to backtrack, saying he’d be happy to have the Univision anchor return.

  After being escorted back in, Ramos again began his question with a statement. “You cannot deny citizenship to children in this country,” he told Trump, referring to proposals to bar from automatic citizenship the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. “You cannot—”

  “Why do you say that?” Trump interrupted.

  “Because you cannot do that . . . You’d have to change the Constitution to do that—”

  “Well . . . no, excuse me,” Trump retorted, talking over Ramos. “A lot of people think that’s not right.”

  When at last Ramos got to his original question about how Trump planned to build the wall, the candidate’s response was simple: “Very easy, I’m a builder.”

  In the coverage of the incident that day, much of the mainstream media focused on whether Trump was too thin-skinned, whether Ramos was an objective journalist or an advocate, and whether by making a statement before his question, he had been grandstanding. In fact, he would later say it was the undocumented activists who had influenced him to speak up and not back down.

  “In Iowa, I was thinking what would a DREAMER do with Donald Trump?” Ramos said. “I decided to stand up because they wouldn’t be seated. I decided to keep talking because they wouldn’t keep silent.”

  Following the Ramos-Trump exchange, few media pundits focused on how after years of internal and external analysis in which the Republican Party had concluded it needed to do a better job reaching out to Latinos and other immigrants, the party’s new mantra seemed simply to be “Let’s build a wall.”

  United We Dream couldn’t get involved directly in politics due to its status as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. But now it decided that staying out of the election altogether could have devastating effects for millions of young undocumented immigrants and their families. It created a new arm, United We Dream Action, which, as a separate 501(c)(4) group, could get involved in limited political activity.

  Top young immigrant activists had already begun lining up with the candidates. United We Dream’s director of advocacy and policy, Lorella Praeli, who had taken over from Gaby Pacheco, joined Hillary Clinton’s campaign in May. Erika Andiola signed up for Bernie Sanders’s campaign that fall.

  Hareth thought about joining one or the other, but she held back. In part, after three years of activism and fighting for her father while trying to finish school, she wanted to focus on her studies. Also, neither of the candidates inspired her. In 2014, during the unaccompanied-minor crisis, Hillary Clinton had echoed the Obama administration’s stance that children who crossed the border should be sent back as quickly as possible to their families in Central America.

  In many ways, it was a practical statement. “Just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean the child gets to stay. So, we don’t want to send a message that is contrary to our laws or will encourage more children to make that dangerous journey,” she said.

  Her views were nuanced, but she made clear that children who could be returned to family members in their home countries should be: “They should be sent back as soon as it can be determined who the responsible adults in their families are.”27

  For Hareth, the notion that children fleeing gang violence, abuse, dire poverty, or all of the above should be sent back as quickly as possible was heartbreaking.

  Then, in the winter of 2015, she was one of several young immigrants invited to a roundtable with Sanders. She liked his talking points about helping unaccompanied minors, ending mass detention, and pushing for executive action and reform, ideas she imagined Erika and other immigration activists working with his team had encouraged. But after the cameras stopped rolling, the candidate didn’t seem much interested in talking with her and the other young immigrants. He seemed tired.

  Hareth wasn’t the only one on the fence. The members of United We Dream Action, like those of many progressive organizations, were split over whether to take direct action in favor of Clinton or Sanders or stay neutral.

  In mid-January, the Supreme Court announced it would accept the Obama administration’s appeal against Texas, a signal that the nation’s top justices believed it was time to weigh in on both immigration and Obama’s efforts to expand the powers of the presidency. More than three hundred civil rights, social groups, and labor organizations signed an amicus brief, urging the court to end the injunction and allow the program to move forward. Law enforcement agencies from Los Angeles County, Boston, El Paso, Salt Lake City, and Dearborn, Michigan, as well as local representatives from a hundred cities and counties, also weighed in, supporting the measure.

  With the court’s conservative majority likely to favor states’ rights as well as a tough stance on illegal immigration, the top immigrant activists and their fellow advocates didn’t hold out much hope. Then the day before Valentine’s Day, Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia died, leaving the court with only eight justices and a roughly even ideological split. That changed things. But the Republican-led Senate refused to hold a hearing to consider Obama’s pick to replace Scalia, throwing off all bets as to what the court might do.

  By early 2016, it also became apparent that the fast-track deportations Obama had promised back in 2014, when he had first announced the expansion of DACA, were in full swing. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials acknowledged the stepped-up efforts in January.

  “This past weekend, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) engaged in concerted, nationwide enforcement operations to take into custody and return at a greater rate adults who entered this country illegally with children,” DHS secretary Jeh Johnson said a statement. “This should come as no surprise. I have said publicly for months that individuals who constitute enforcement priorities, including families and unaccompanied children, will be removed.”28

  The young activists awaited the Court’s ruling as the presidential race heated up.

  IN THE FALL of 2015, Isabel won a scholarship to the City University of New York’s PhD program to study sociology. Felipe was worn out by commuting between Tampa and Washington, DC, for his work with United We Dream, and by the separation from Isabel. They also needed money now that Isabel was going back to school. Felipe took a job at a tech company seeking to expand its philanthropic arm, where he was paid to look at struggles around the globe, including education reform efforts in his native Brazil.

  In Brazil, he saw a different kind of activism, one based on collective storytelling rather than that of the individual. “They talk about ‘This happened to our village. Then the military came,’ and they tell their personal stories, but it’s about the larger community,” he said. “We’ve been telling our individual stories first, in order to get at the community.”

  Maybe, he thought, the immigrant rights activists needed to better explain how their individual stories fit within the larger narrative of the country. The collective story was hardly a new form of activism—it had been the bedrock of the 1960s civil rights movement—but it was one that the DREAMers had often rejected in lieu of the Horatio A
lger–style American success story. The image of individual young undocumented immigrants who through hard work could successfully pursue the American dream had been effective in capturing the nation’s attention. But Felipe wondered if new tactics were now needed.

  Something else happened when he started visiting Brazil. Much to his amazement, his extended family welcomed Isabel, with trepidation at first but eventually with open, if slightly bewildered, arms. Felipe’s mother still refused to recognize Isabel, let alone Felipe’s marriage. Yet Felipe no longer spoke of her rejection with the pained longing of a child but rather with the cool detachment of an adult.

  “That’s how she feels. It’s the Evangelical Church she belongs to,” he said.

  He and Isabel moved into the basement of a house in Queens, which they shared with friends and called Casa Mariposa, a nod to the adopted immigrant symbol of the butterfly. Felipe kept their fridge stocked with milk and cheese—just because he could. Having cheese in the house was still his daily reminder: “I’m okay. I have enough.”

  In March 2016, they threw a housewarming and thirtieth birthday party for Felipe, turning it into a fund-raiser for his old group GetEQUAL.

  They invited friends from across their lives: LGBTQ and Black Lives Matter activists and members of United We Dream. Laura Figueroa, Felipe’s old high school confidante who’d invited him to the church, came, as did Monona Yin of the Four Freedoms Fund, a champion of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, where Felipe and Isabel had met. One friend brought a cake, a sloping, teetering mass of spongy blocks frosted in bright colors in homage to the favelas (shantytowns) near Rio, where Felipe had grown up.

  Felipe dressed up, sporting a blue button-down shirt. Isabel chose a short red dress with lipstick and heels to match. Felipe grinned as Isabel descended the stairs. As Isabel increasingly defied gender labels, he’d wondered if he’d still be as attracted to the person he’d fallen so hard for back in 2008. Turned out the answer was a resounding yes. Isabel’s fierce independence, whether it took the form of walking to Washington, refusing to shake the president’s hand, or putting on a little red dress, was part of what attracted Felipe to his husband. But it was what Isabel’s evolving identity said about his own self that gave Felipe pause. He’d spent so many years fighting with his family and the world to be recognized as a proud gay man, an “UndocuQueer.” He was no longer undocumented, but he was a staunch member of the LGBTQ community. Yet now, if strangers asked the name of his partner, more than likely they would assume he had a wife. If Isabel identified more as a woman, Felipe wondered if he could still claim his identity as a queer man.